Alzheimer’s Prevention Registry Enrolls 40,000 Volunteers in Major Research Project

The Alzheimer’s Prevention Registry recently enrolled the 40,000th volunteer to take part in a major study on Alzheimer’s disease that will be conducted by Banner Alzheimer’s Institute (BAI) in collaboration with other organizations and scientists. The online gateway’s main purpose is to accelerate research by connecting healthy people who are committed to preventing Alzheimer’s with scientists carrying out research studies.

To register, participants were simply required to be older than 18 years and active advocates for fighting the disease. Each registration is unique and connects each individual set of data to researchers seeking a cure or a new treatment. The Alzheimer’s Prevention Registry is part of the Alzheimer’s Prevention Initiative (API), an international collaborative launched in 2011 to accelerate the pace of research.

“Every person who joins is helping to further research and is bringing us one step closer to unlocking the mysteries of this devastating disease,” explained the principal scientist at BAI and associate director of the API, Jessica Langbaum, Ph.D. “We’re excited about the momentum of current prevention research, as many studies begin to recruit and the Registry plays a crucial role in overcoming recruitment barriers.”

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The Registry aims to accelerate the pace of Alzheimer’s research, as it remains the only disease among the top 10 causes of death that has no cure or treatment. Therefore, this new initiative works by recruiting volunteers all over the world that want to become registry members, which means they will receive regular updates on the latest scientific advances, and news and information on overall brain health.

Alzheimer’s affects about five million Americans within the demographic of people older than 65 years, and is a debilitating and incurable disease that begins to develop in the brain ever before the symptoms are visible. During this period in which symptoms are not perceptible, researchers believe it is possible to slow or even stop the disease. However, there is no current cure and research is delayed in part due to the difficulty to find volunteers.